Streaming is important, especially for longer videos. I don't believe any static hosting site supports video streaming.

I suppose any reasonable browser can play off a HTTP stream. I not so sure it would be able to navigate in the stream easily (like clicking at a particular time on the progress bar), because the bitrate is highly variable.

What else am I missing?

Dynamic bitrate is the main one - the browser & server coordinate to figure out the highest video quality the user can watch without stuttering/buffering.

The client can do that 100% client side, you can serve pure static files with a JS player that handles the streaming. All you have to do is chunk the video into small 2-5 second chunks at a variety of nitrates and list them all in an .m3u8 playlist file if the right format.

I know because I explored this for a hobby project of a movie I liked. See here: http://lelandbatey.com/projects/REDLINE-intro/

Use your network inspector to observe your browser requesting the individual chunks over time. Note that my server is just an Apache2 file server.

Pretty cool!

always wondered how this handles prebuffering. (i.e. max-prebuffer = chunk-size) ?

> any reasonable browser can play off a HTTP stream

most video players also support http and there is no problem with just putting files up.

imho all the streaming tech, drm, hls, adaptive bitrate selection and whatnot, are just commercial fads to increase margin

Adaptive bitrate selection seems important if your clients have narrow or unstable bandwidth (e.g. mobile), or when you may get constrained by outgoing bandwidth (/. effect aka HN crowd).

imo this is mainly due to the constraint of keeping clientside pre-buffering as low as possible.

sending the whole file at network-speed usually works fine, but maybe uneconomical at scale especially if coupled with users that skip a lot and tend to not watch the whole thing anyway.

Amazon S3 (static hosting) supports streaming[1], but doesn’t transfer the hosting “cost” to the user as YT does.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/tutori...

The video is 57 seconds long. Should be fine ~ kinda.

My host doesn't support video. If I point <video> at a file it plays just fine but the server doesn't do partial content so the player crashes or stutters if the user attempts to seek outside what was downloaded. When the whole thing is downloaded it works smoothly but it isn't quite acceptable. There is no easy html way to preserve the seek/progress bar and `Accept-Ranges: none` has the same meaning as not setting the header(?)

I cant seem to find answers or bugs, all I find "make sure your server supports partial content" which really isn't required to make it work.

Right but if you have your own ip address and fiber connection that should be enough for narrow-casting.

I'm surprised to see my inexpressible urges documented by others. I'm with these people 100% right down to why a sailboat.

I tried to do this with an apartment building. The building is too large to focus on a the detail I need. A 43' sailboat is actually a great size to prototype on.

I have a signed P&S and hope to be hard core boat living sometime in September. The idea will be the studio time I get while on land will be much sweeter if I spend a lot of time on a boat.

The boat is self-contained so my aspirations won't effect people paying rent.

The building has everything I need to host my own streaming. I don't know that I will ever publish content, but if I do it will be entirely self-hosted. If the audience is so vast that brings everything to a halt, things will start functioning again once the hordes get bored.

Think of all the wasted brain power content-creators go through to keep YouTube at bay.

I believe content should be the residue of the work. I think once publishing is the funding source it may distort the work.

You can just turn your video file into a bunch of HSL or MPEG Dash segments and store then as static file with a playlist/manifest file next to them, and tada! you now have video streaming in your static hosting site.

Correct. Progressive MP4 also do the trick. Many open-source tool such as ffmpeg (generalist), gpac (specialized in this and leveraging ffmpeg), etc. in the area.

most ppl probably fall into the category where self-hosting their content is viable, though most also don't know anything about it, hence the outsourcing

This is what I ended up doing. I used HandBrake to reduce the video to a reasonable size and then just put the MP4 on the site like anything else. I guess I'm getting a little carried away with my "minimalist" attitude in this case, where I want the video to be super light. Looks like a 2 minute video is about 4mb. Not great but not that bad compared to other modern websites either.

This will work for now but my mind still wonders if there isn't a better way to reduce the size of these. I'll continue to experiment.